“I’ve come because of the ad”, I answered to the closed door. The eye remained for a while looking hard at me through the peephole, till finally a string of bolts and latches began to be drawn back. “Hmmm, safety”, I thought, “I like it”. As soon as the door was half-open, a cloud of unidentifiable stenches slapped me and squeezed into my nasal cavities, extorting a retching from me.

The face that showed up, capped with a crown of hair-curlers, was wrinkled as a mole, maybe by knitting the nose so much to endure the smell. Her eyes strove to focus on me through the unfathomable glasses and, when they did it, the chapped lips pursed with a smile, setting the wrinkles off and raising the cigarette. “Has you comed for looking the home?”, the old lady asked me in a bloodcurdling English with an accent from hell. Before I could even puzzle the question out, her hand had snatched my suitcase away and she was stumbling on through a corridor, expecting me to follow her. I did it, but leaving the door ajar to allow fresh air to come in… and just in case I had to make a run for it. In front of me, I could hear my poor suitcase beating on every corner of the passage, and I feared for my camera and my sanity.

The echo of the last blow died away after she had dropped the luggage on the kitchen floor, if kitchen is the right word. What I saw first was the monster, a bulldog ugly as sin that urinated on my suitcase with every confidence. Then the unsettling setting, Apocalypses’ quintessence, weighed me down. For the rest of my days, I’ll suffer nightmares with reminiscences of what I saw there: the corpses of those plants dead from thirst, the millennial dust grafted on the filthy cracked walls, the spirals of smoke rising from that socket overloaded with adaptors, the squad of flies overflying us and taking a dive, the clogged sink with leftovers of something oily and raw, and the purring ventilator that threw all that amalgam of stinks in my direction. I couldn’t hold my breath forever, so I had no alternative but inhaling one puff of that harmful atmosphere.

“A cup of café?”, the old witch asked me, while stretching out one hand towards that pitcher of lumpy tar.

“No, thanks”, I answered, fearing for my life and even my soul, “I’ve already had one”.

“Then a piss of toast”, she insisted on poisoning me.

By survival instinct, my intention was retreating after having hurled myself on my suitcase, but the dog had taken it for a fluffy mattress for him and his ticks, wallowing on it as a pig in a mire.

“An accident?”, I asked her, referring to her arm in a sling.

“Oh, the blender”, she answered picking her nose, “as usual”.

Just then the toaster erupted and the pieces of toast jumped through the air. She only was able to save one. The dog swallowed the other… and remained alive!

“Butter or ice-cream?”, she asked me, and I hoped that she had committed another linguistic mistake.

When I tried to retrieve my suitcase, the monster growled to my hand in an undertone. Probably, in order to survive, he used to eat one of the two toasts she prepared at a time, and to drink the rain water settled in the set of empty tins and glasses under the leaks in the ceiling, so my thumb could suddenly seem a delight to him.

Something seemed to moan into the oven, maybe the yeast of a project of cake swelling with pain, and above it some kind of stew bubbled in the pot.

“Me could iron yours clothes”, she offered herself pointing to the ironing-board, where a dull shirt showed first-degree burns as a result of her skilfulness.

“But… but you hasn’t seen the toilet yet!”, I heard her say before I closed the door with a slam.